Elizabeth Gilbert: What’s not to love?

'Being a person of character matters to me now...' Writer Elizabeth Gilbert (image: book PR)

Elizabeth Gilbert writing in her new book Committed:

I am sorry to confess that I possessed a scant amount of honour in my youth, if any, and behaving in a flighty and thoughtless manner was a bit of a speciality of mine.But being a person of character matters to me now, and matters only more as I grow older.

What is there not to love about this wonderful writer?

Her TED talk on ‘nurturing creativity’ and the creative struggle is, in my eyes, a masterwork of engaging, humble, rapport-building, essence-of-good-person-with-talent-who-has-worked-hard-and-thought-hard-to-refine-her-craft. I find her very inspiring.

There’s a lightness to her writing, a ‘nicely-put’-ness. It’s not as transparent as some other good writers, doesn’t drop away in my experience, but no bother — I find myself appreciating how she has phrased a thought, her word choice (e.g. ‘scant’ above), her writer’s voice: It’s light and efficient, but rounded and fitting. She seems to seek to communicate, not draw unnecessary attention to herself. Very, very good.

I fluked onto that TED video a few days after it was published [thanks PS]. It will probably stay on my iPhone forever, along with Michael Crichton’s interview (chalk and cheese). What she says is so well-said. (OK, I’m gushing…)

“But being a person of character matters to me now, and matters only more as I grow older.”

6 Comments »

Pete, you’ve been snowed by a beautiful, articulate woman or angel of light! As you say, there’s nothing new under the sun and her “radical” idea is merely recycling two very old revelations, one good and one evil (yes, I know good & evil sounds harsh to our pampered modern ears but we need to grasp reality before we go completely deaf).

The good is her at last recognising that we are, and always have been, all supposed to acknowledge that we come into this world with nothing and we go out with nothing, that every good thing we have to use, we received as gifts or talents. Long before the Greeks & Romans, Job saw this & Solomon called it humility. It was the so-called Enlightenment that made us so stupid as to believe it all comes from us. And it is how we use everything we’ve been given that forms us as unique individuals, our personality and character. In this, she’s engagingly right.

As for the dark side, the Romans actually so valued the genius or daemon of the emperors who had brought them Pax Romana that they began to worship them. Far from humbling the emperors, they accepted it as their due! More recently, Hitler accepted his supernatural calling to save Germany from the Jews from a daemon using Wagner’s “Rienzi: the Last of the Tribunes”.

Elizabeth is absolutely right in her diagnosis of hubris being the destroyer of so many multi-talented writers and artists but absolutely wrong in her suggested cure. Help will not come from crediting daemons who offer us glory but instead from the original Giver who can also keep us humble.

We don’t need to invite fairies/daemons/demons into our lives. Far less worship them or take ‘guidance’ from them. But that’s not what I hear her saying, anyway..

I see what (oh yes, beautiful) Elizabeth Gilbert is presenting as a model, a metaphor, almost a meditation on what she calls ‘the capriciousness’ (good word) and elusiveness of the creative process.

She’s personalising it to illustrate, to help get a handle on it in the same way Steven Pressfield personifies ‘resistance’ in his masterpiece The War of Art.

The story of the poet feeling “a poem barrelling down the landscape” … versus Gilbert’s ‘mule’ (get up at the same time each day and WORK!) well, that mule does it for me. I can relate. Working in my circle of influence. (But sometimes, zing, I get in the zone and it’s magical.)

It also reminds me of Gary Player’s wonderful: ‘The harder I work, the luckier I get’ — or Woody Allen’s ’90 percent of success is just showing up’.

For me: it’s about work process. That’s my job. I am determined to show up for my part of the job. And if talking to my ‘muse’ or an empty chair helps, well, OK.

I do remember, years ago, reading a biography of Peter Sellers (probably Peter Sellers – the Mask behind the Mask by Peter Evans) which described how he would seek to be ‘inhabited’ with the spirit of the character he was to play.

The biographer quoted Sellers’ staff and family saying he would stare at a full length mirror for hours and ‘become’ that character — then they would find themselves living with, not Peter, but ‘someone else’ … until he shook that ‘possession’ off.

I was spooked by reading that.

I didn’t (and don’t) think it’s a good idea to ‘open the gates’ like that. (Call me superstitious if you like, but It’s amazing how often you stumble across what I call ‘occult’-type stuff in the most unlikely places.)

However, I don’t see Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘psychological construct’ to put some ‘distance’ between us and our work (as outlined in her TED talk) as dwelling in the same neighbourhood. – P